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Thursday, September 4, 2025

When the dress is made of money, folly's in the air

The Girl in the Green Dress


It’s not often that a dead man opens the story that will be narrated by him as a young man. Common in memoir but less so in crime fiction, it’s redolent of the golden age of detective fiction, although set in 1920 New York City rather than an isolated English manor  house.

Our protagonist is Morris Markey, a striving reporter in a city famed for novelists, essayists, poets. All the famous people of the era get a mention in the opening chapter, none more than F. Scott Fitzgerald, larger and brighter than life, his meteoric rise just begun.

Following a disgruntling evening party where Fitzgerald is lauded and our protagonist is ignored, Markey spies the titular woman in the green dress going into a townhouse opposite his cramped basement flat with bon vivant womanizer Joseph Elwell. Come dawn, Elwell is dead inside his locked house and the girl is gone as if she never existed.

As the hunt for the woman in the green dress heats up, Mark spends more time with Zelda Fitzgerald, than her own husband does. This mercurial historical percentage is captured with delicate, nuanced admiration, not unmixed with cynicism. Scott and Zelda are a phenomenon, deliberately cultivating their image and fascinated by what is said and reported about themselves. Yet Zelda‘s keen observations help our reporter peer into the mysterious, to him, ways of women in that era, liberated on the surface although few control their own money and most are at the mercy of husbands who bought them for their pedigree or their looks. Markey makes his reputation as a reporter on the solution but he knows the story his paper printed isn't the whole truth. So he keeps digging.

One thing that jumped out at me, possibly because I’m a writer and possibly because I have long studied New York writer culture of the early 20th century, was the brief observation that Fitzgerald was using his wife’s words in his work. How much of the work is Zelda's rather than Scott's is dwelt upon, not being what this book is about. But what I’m taking away is the implication that Fitzgerald decided Zelda didn’t have the emotional  stability to turn the output of her erratic, brilliant mind into books, and therefore her words were fair game for him. Whether that’s his selfish justification for essentially mining that disturbed woman’s sparkling veneer for his best-selling books is still an open question to me. But it is at the core of that marriage, whether as cement or as an unbridgeable schism. 
 
And thus the Scott-Zelda relationship acts as both theme and spotlight against which the other marriages in the book, the excesses and spectacular flame-outs of the wild post-WW1 era itself, are set. Zelda's emotional fragility and Scott's alternating care for her with going off the rails himself reflect the instability and psychological damage that many veterans of the trenches, now trying to establish their post-war lives, carry with them.

Markey was of course a real newspaper, man, who did die at his home desk approximately as described in the opening chapter. While many of the characters are drawn from life of the era, and Elwell did in fact die under mysterious circumstances, all the rest of this Markey's fictional investigation is careful accretion, substitution, and juxtaposition of people and events that were in fact scattered over New York City and the surrounding states over several months.

All in all, this is a fascinating murder mystery, wrapped up in the wild mess of NYC’s showbiz and gambling and politics as covered by reporters who were often little better than modern paparazzi, chasing celebrities around the city and the clock for scandals to feed their fluctuating paychecks.

Competently written, elegantly character-sketched, this is a novel to pair with a glass of bubbly and a plate of canapés while big band razamatazz plays in the background.

Thanks, Netgalley and Macmillan, for the review copy.
 


By Studio photographer - F. Scott Fitzgerald Archives, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93375600
 
 
By Zelda Fitzgerald - Google Images, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75476145

 



#Netgalley #Macmillan #MariahFredericks #RoaringTwenties #JosephElwell #murder #shooting #unsolved #fiction #reporter #politics #riches #socialites #writers #WW1 #PTSD #spying #ZeldaFitzgerald #FScottFitzgerald #MorrisMarkey



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